I agree with Matthew Yglesias about a lot of things. His take on Samuel Ferecito....I mean Samuel Alito, is no exception:
After an uninformative confirmation hearing, Alito will be confirmed by a comfortable margin to the general approval of highbrow centrist opinion. He'll proceed to spend the next 20 years on the Court making America a somewhat worse place than it might otherwise be. Conservatives will continue to fail in their efforts to transform the country into some idealized version of the 1950s and will presumably blame this on college professors and Anthony Kennedy.
Also, in the department of Nothing Unusual Here, I think Yglesias's colleague, Garance Franke-Ruta, is off-base:
In now appointing the Princeton- and Yale-educated far-right jurist Samuel Alito to the Court, the president seems determined to create a 21st-century Supreme Court that looks less and less like America and more and more like a mid-20th-century Ivy League eating club.
Franke-Ruta is upset that Bush's pick wasn't a woman. In a sane world, she would have a point. But we live in a world where George fucking Bush is the president. His short-list of females? Edith Jones, Janice Rogers Brown, Priscilla Owen. All right-wing nutcases, all as or more hostile towards the issues Garance cares about, all, I would argue, worse than Alito. Would Franke-Ruta be so upset if Bush had nomintaed Owen? She would implement the same if not more extreme views. But hey, she's got ovaries.
I'm not saying it's not important to have women on the court. But just like the solution to black representation on the court sure as fuck was not Clarence Thomas, the solution to female representation is not anybody on George's shortlist.
Sock-puppet Secretary of the Treasury John Snow wanted to secretize a little bit on the state of the economy.
TOKYO (Reuters) - U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow said on Tuesday he wanted to see more progress toward flexibility in China's currency regime.
``We'd like to see more progress on the path toward flexibility,'' he said in an interview with Reuters Television.
That's nice. What can we do about those intractable Chinese and their fixed-rate currency? Nothing. Why is this? Because the Chinese Central Bank holds so much US debt it can do what it wants. China has Uncle Sam by the balls.
He added that oil prices are a risk for global economic growth.
"These prices are way too high,'' he said. ``These prices, if sustained, could hurt the growth rates of global economies.''
What does this even mean? Prices are too high? What the hell are you going to do about? What the hell is anybody to do about it. I wanted to write a separate post about how funny it would be if gas prices, of all things, turned out to be the albatross of the Bush administration. As if the Bush administration could control gas prices. Here, Snow is simply reading from the memo sent out to all Bush flunkies, which reads: "Say something about energy costs that sounds like you give a shit." The reality is much bigger, and much darker, than anything John Snow can offer.
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/business/business-economy-snow.html
Our foreign policy is run by idiots. This is the simplest way I can describe the level of ignorance and fanaticism driving the country today. Bush’s “major address” on “the nature of the enemy” is just the latest example.
What the hell kind of policy focuses on “the nature” of something? Bush uses the phrase constantly, press-monkey Scott McClellan must have used it a dozen times during his conference last week, Kathryn-Jean Lopez over at The Corner laps it up....and it’s all bullshit. Let’s start with the faulty assumption that al-qaeda is an actual organization, as opposed to, say, a brand-name, or as Juan Cole puts it, “a loose set of radical ideas that fringe groups can take up at will.” According to K-Lo and Scott McClellan, this group is defined by something internal, inherent, and immutable. Bush seems to view a lot of things and people in this way, constantly referring to “the soul of X” or “the character of Y.” (See all his talk about knowing "the heart" of Harriet Miers.)
The problem with this is that it completely ignores any external factors. Like, I don't know, logic. This is why we never get any serious discussion about terrorism. According to the “Nature of the Enemy” theory, terrorists espouse no goals, no political views. There is no such thing as cause and effect. Not only are grievances not legitimate, they don’t even exist. Nothing anyone does could possible alter the actions of a terrorist because you can’t alter something inherent. It’s evil in a vacuuum, sprung from the ground without source, without history, and certainly without reason. It’s the 21st century example of the devil.
The theory is so pernicious because it cuts off any solution that’s not some crude version of “let’s kill ‘em all.” If evil has nothing underlying it, no motives, no reasons, then all you’re left with is brute force. The net result is a foreign policy based “rooting out the terrorists” and other fantasies.
Bush’s speech is full of this nonsense, as well as all the usual nonsense, not least of which is the parallel idea of a single “terrorist ideology.” Chechnya, Kashmir, Beirut....these places all make appearances in the speech and are treated as One Big Evil Thing. They’re all just terrorists, and they’re all the same.
Juan Cole breaks apart the speech over at his site. I recommend the whole thing, but here is one of the more important points:
Bush: The influence of Islamic radicalism is also magnified by helpers and enablers. They have been sheltered by authoritarian regimes, allies of convenience like Syria and Iran that share the goal of hurting America and moderate Muslim governments .
Cole: This line is the most lunatic thing in Bush's speech. It is outrageous. It is the Big Lie. Syria has a secular Baath Arab nationalist government. The regime killed 10,000 Muslim activists at Hama in 1982. It tortured al-Qaeda members for the United States after September 11. Syria, a small country of only 18 million, has no ability to harm the United States and it most certainly is not in alliance with radical Muslim fundamentalists!
As for Iran, its brand of fundamentalism is Shiite. Al-Qaeda is made up of Sunnis and Wahhabis, who despise Shiites. Iran supports the new, Shiite-dominated government in Iraq. It supported the Jan. 30 elections. It supports the new constitution and the referendum. Iran hated the Taliban and very nearly went to war against them, backing the Northern Alliance instead. The Shiite Iranians hate the radical Salafis like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who has called for a war of extermination against the Shiites.
Bush's attempt to conflate the regimes he doesn't like with al-Qaeda makes nonsense of his whole vision.
It would be as though someone who disliked the United States and France should posit Southern Baptist American support for the Catholic Irish Republican Army because France is a US ally and is Catholic. To anyone who knows anything at all about the Middle East, Bush has made a mishmash of unrelated things and attempted to construct a bogeyman out of them.”
Elsewhere, Bush raises the specter of dead schoolchildren in Russia to claim that actions in Iraq do nothing to further radicalize the region. Hey, Russia wasn’t in Iraq, right? Look what happened to those kids! Over at Tapped, Yglesias nails it succinctly:
Bush: The hatred of the radicals existed before Iraq was an issue, and it will exist after Iraq is no longer an excuse. The government of Russia did not support Operation Iraqi Freedom, and yet the militants killed more than 180 Russian schoolchildren in Beslan.
Yglesias: I'll grant the president this much. If the United States were to withdraw from Iraq and commence a much more brutal occupation of Chechnya, that would accomplish very little in terms of reducing the appeal of anti-Americanism in the Muslim world.
For Bush, it’s sad that a grown man believes this nonsense. For the rest of us, it’s a tragedy.
http://www.juancole.com/2005/10/arguing-with-bush-and-gwot-bush.html